Conservation Starts with Farmers and Ranchers

Miriam Horn, a speaker at AFBF’s Communications Conference last week, said in Newsline (June 8, 2017) that farmers and ranchers are the starting point of conservation and good stewardship.

The author and Environmental Defense Fund staffer spent three years putting together the book “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland.” Horn wrote the book to push back against the myth that the only people who care about conservation and good stewardship are environmentalists. The book, which was turned into a documentary, focuses on how farmers and ranchers work to produce food on a large scale, while at the same time they work to protect and restore the soil, and protect air and water quality.

“I knew from my own past that farmers and ranchers were doing some of the most important stewardship in America, that they really knew and loved the land as much as anyone, they often had generations of heritage there and children that they wanted to pass that heritage on to,” Horn said. She really wanted “to reveal what seemed to me a hidden story of heroes.”

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